here - Linguistic Society of America

Ernest Lawrence Abel (Wayne State University) Session 61Dickensian eponymsCharles Dickens created almost a thousand fictional characters, many of whom have become synonyms for types of people ortheir peculiar traits. This presentation surveys some of these Dickensian eponyms, cites their first appearance as such andprovides examples of their usage in magazines, books, and the internet.Ernest Lawrence Abel (Wayne State University) Session 67Toponymous disorders: city syndromesThere is a long tradition of naming diseases and disorders after places where they were first discovered. This presentationexamines psychological syndromes named after the cities in which they first or primarily occurred. The city syndromes arecategorized in terms of “tourist syndromes,” “hostage syndromes,” or “miscellaneous syndromes.”Natasha Abner (University of Chicago) Session 34Deriving meaning in the VP and DP: the case of possessives in American Sign LanguageThe POSS sign in American Sign Language (ASL) is used in both attributive and predicative possessives. Attributive POSSpossessives display quantificational variability that is sensitive to word order patterns within the DP. Predicative POSSpossessives are subject to a 'strict possession' requirement not uniformly present in attributive structures. Based on languageinternalevidence that POSS functions as a verbal predicate and is introduced in attributive possessives as a prenominal relativeclause modifier, these patterns result from the interaction of verbal POSS structures with components of the DP and VP domains:DP-peripheral topicality of the possessor and the structure of locative predication.Steven Abney (University of Michigan) Session 46Ezra Keshet (University of Michigan)CNF as semantic meta-languageWe adopt Conjunctive Normal Form, a quantifer-free subset of first-order predicate calculus inferentially equivalent to generalFOPC, as a semantic meta-language and present a compositional system translating natural language LF trees directly into CNF.The cases in (1) and (2), which are problematic for standard DRT and DPL (Groenendijk & Stokhof 1991), fall out of the CNFsemantics without stipulation. In addition, the system handles cases of cataphora and telescoping (Roberts 1989) and other crosssententialanaphora (Evans 1980).(1) Either there's no bathroom, or it's in a funny place.(2) Every farmer who owns a donkey beats it.Eric Acton (Stanford University) Session 17Gender differences in the duration of filled pauses in North American EnglishPrevious research on the English 'filled pauses' um and uh reveals that, across a variety of dialects of English, women have a farhigher average ratio of tokens of um to tokens of uh than do men. One potential explanation for these results is that, relative tomen, women tend to disprefer sustained vocalic segments in producing filled pauses, thereby opting for um over its coda-lesscounterpart at a higher rate than men. I present evidence in support of this proposal, based on a corpus study of genderdifferences in segment duration in the production of um and uh.Chris Adam (University of New Mexico) Session 20Aaron Marks (University of New Mexico)Acoustic bases for place-faithful loan adaptationLanguages may adopt either a place-faithful or a manner-faithful orientation in loan-adaptation, the choice of which correlateswith a language’s current phoneme inventory. Within place-faithful languages, there is a specific asymmetry regarding theadaptation of imported fricatives: voiceless fricatives map onto voiceless aspirate plosives (when a contrast exists), but voicedfricatives map onto voiced non-aspirate plosives, not voiced aspirate plosives. A statistical analysis of this phenomenon in Hindi-Urdu reveals that this mapping involves a pairing of segments based on similarity of mean duration.123